The Age of the Sages: The Axial Age in Asia and the Near East

13. The Noble Path

13 The Noble Path In a chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled “The Preachers of Death,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the Buddha: “There are those with consumption of the soul: hardly are they born when they begin to die and to long for doctrines of weariness and renunciation. They would like to be dead, and we should welcome their wish. Let us beware of waking the dead and disturbing these living coffins! They encounter a sick man or an old man or a corpse and immediately they say, ‘Life is refuted.’ But only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence.”1 Nietzsche was far from alone in his assessment. When Westerners first began to study Buddhism, they had difficulty overcoming the impression that the religion was nihilistic. They were, however, wrong. To be fair to Nietzsche and the others, there is much in the Buddha’s teaching that on the surface seems rather gloomy. Yet the West’s negative evaluation failed to penetrate the Buddha’s teaching deeply enough to recognize its ultimately optimistic outlook. Like Jesus, the Buddha proclaimed a “gospel,” that is, good news for humanity. These glad tidings are found in the Third and Fourth Noble Truths. The Third Noble Truth The Buddha’s good news was straightforward and simple: You do not have to suffer. Genuine, enduring happiness is possible. In the first discourse offered to the five monks in the Deer Park, the Buddha explains the Third Noble Truth: “Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.”2 If tanha—thirst or 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 157. 2. Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma in Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom, 2000), 1844. 123 “Simply stated, nibbana is the end of suffering. It is the point at which one stops craving for reality to be other than it is. It is the radical acceptance of the way things are.” craving—is the cause of dukkha, then the solution is clear: stop craving! If we cease craving, we end attachments; if we end attachments, we end suffering and rebirth. Once the problem is properly analyzed, the resolution is obvious. The difficulty, of course, is giving up craving. The phenomenon of craving has many contributing factors, as we have seen. We have mentioned the insidious way that mere desire can turn into thirst and addiction, the way the belief in a permanent self generates desire and fear, and the way our misapprehension of reality causes us to perceive permanence where there is only change. All of these—and other things—contribute to craving. Because of the many factors involved, and because it is a deeply ingrained pattern of experience, ending craving requires a multifaceted and incremental approach. That method for quenching thirst is detailed for us in the Fourth Noble Truth. But before we discuss the way to that goal, we must discuss the goal itself. Understanding the objective will help us see why the Buddha formulates the path in the way he does. The objective is nibbana, or nirvana, the Sanskrit term more familiar to Westerners. Nirvana, like karma, is now common in the English language but is often greatly misunderstood. Some think of it as a place one goes, like heaven. Others conceive of it as a state of intense pleasure. Many—like Nietzsche—thought of nirvana as self-annihilation. To distance this concept from these misapprehensions, we will use the Pali term nibbana rather than the more familiar form. Simply stated, nibbana is the end of dukkha. It is the point at which one stops craving for reality to be other than it is. It is the radical acceptance of the way things are. The principal language about nibbana is negative. The Buddha called it the eradication of desire, the cessation of thirst, and the destruction of illusion. It may be even valid to say that nibbana is self-annihilation, if we bear in mind that the annihilated self is not real; what is annihilated is the illusion of a separate substantial self. Nibbana is usually described in negative terms but not because it is a negative state. Like Brahman in...